"Look here! all this is about a landlord not a hundred miles from

Middlemarch, who receives his own rents. They say he is the most

retrogressive man in the county. I think you must have taught them

that word in the 'Pioneer.'"

"Oh, that is Keck--an illiterate fellow, you know. Retrogressive, now!

Come, that's capital. He thinks it means destructive: they want to

make me out a destructive, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with that

cheerfulness which is usually sustained by an adversary's ignorance.

"I think he knows the meaning of the word. Here is a sharp stroke or

two. If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil

sense of the word--we should say, he is one who would dub himself a

reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is

immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot

bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants

being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his

farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does

not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very

open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any

number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own

pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to

help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather

out at a tenant's barn-door or make his house look a little less like

an Irish cottier's. But we all know the wag's definition of a

philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of

the distance. And so on. All the rest is to show what sort of

legislator a philanthropist is likely to make," ended the Rector,

throwing down the paper, and clasping his hands at the back of his

head, while he looked at Mr. Brooke with an air of amused neutrality.

"Come, that's rather good, you know," said Mr. Brooke, taking up the

paper and trying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did, but

coloring and smiling rather nervously; "that about roaring himself red

at rotten boroughs--I never made a speech about rotten boroughs in my

life. And as to roaring myself red and that kind of thing--these men

never understand what is good satire. Satire, you know, should be true

up to a certain point. I recollect they said that in 'The Edinburgh'

somewhere--it must be true up to a certain point."

"Well, that is really a hit about the gates," said Sir James, anxious

to tread carefully. "Dagley complained to me the other day that he

hadn't got a decent gate on his farm. Garth has invented a new pattern

of gate--I wish you would try it. One ought to use some of one's

timber in that way."




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